Revisions Status: May 20 2015

This is the second of a series of posts on the status of my revisions to Axon, Inc. The first one is here. As before, instead of giving spoilers or arbitrary word counts, I’m going to reference my Story Map here. The Story Map reveals the basic shape of the novel, without being specific about what actually happens. So this is what remains to be done for each of the main chunks of the novel:

DEPARTURE

The Call to Adventure.

The Opening Image. Finished.

Setup of Home, Work, and Play. Finished.

Catalyst. Finished.

Refusal of the Call.

Debate, Break Into Two. In progress, and going really well.

Supernatural Aid.

This section needs extensive revision, but I’ll be able to reuse and repurpose a lot of existing draft materials.

Crossing the First Threshold

This section just requires minor revisions.

Belly of the Whale

This section just requires minor revisions.

INITIATION

Road of Trials.

This is by far the longest part of the book. But it needs to be even longer, in order to beef up some of the primary themes, and explore the character relationships in more depth.

Meeting with the Goddess

This is in pretty good shape: just needs minor revisions.

Woman as Temptress

All Is Lost. Minor revisions.

Dark Night of the Soul. A fair bit of work is needed here — several pages of additions, but pretty straightforward ones.

Atonement with Father

This section needs minor revisions.

Apotheosis

This section just needs some small revisions, and is combined with the Ultimate Boon in the final scene.

RETURN

I don’t think it’s spoilers, if you’ve read this far, to say that the book doesn’t spend much time on the ‘Return’ section of Campbell’s story arc. After all, these are characters based on the Norse gods. They had no happily ever after… but their end was spectacular.

Progress hasn’t been as quick as I’d hoped (primarily because of work commitments), so I’m pushing the expected finish date to Aug 1.

Thanks! Life keeps happening, of course, and since this isn’t my day job, I haven’t made a lot of progress since this was posted. But I’m extremely pleased with how the revisions are going. Perhaps being forced to work very slowly has allowed my subconscious to get a lot done in the background — when I do get a chance to sit down and work, the words come quickly and, to me at least, the quality seems very high. I’m considering putting up a stand-alone excerpt from a recent chapter that seemed particularly good…!